A dear friend of mine once told me a story about making Christmas ornaments with her three young daughters. The eldest daughter took great care with hers, applying the paint with an artistic touch and making a beautiful ornament. The middle daughter was all about show so her ornament had feathers and glitter all over it. The youngest daughter was in a bad mood for whatever reason that day. She painted her ornament ball a solid black and wrote the words MAD DOG! on it in bright red capital letters.

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Can you guess which ornament they all talk about every year at the holidays? It holds court front and center on her tree, and I smile every time I think about it as well. I have a similar story - Anna and I once made ornaments out of modeling clay and toddler David tried to take a bite out of one thinking it was a cookie. It hangs on the tree, bite mark and all. It also reminds me, as it should, that your kids will grow up and forget three-fourths of whatever they got under the tree every year, but special memories stay with them always.

This year, I'm going to try to make sure we have lots of those. We'll be having family Christmas movie night once a week through the season, and we're making construction paper garlands for the tree and paper snowflakes for the windows, and delivery food to the local food pantry, and caroling and driving around looking at Christmas lights and chasing the cat down to put the elastic reindeer antlers on her. We're going to fill this house to bursting with love and memories, and we'll call it our gift to each other.

Our gift of each other. We may not have everything these days, but what we've got, we've got good.

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